An unkind reviewer once sniffed that novelist Tom Clancy wrote about East-West relations and military hardware because he “misses the Cold War badly.”

We don’t know if Clancy pined for the Cold War, but we do know this: His best-selling fiction usually impressed people who were experts in foreign and military matters.

Not bad for a former insurance salesman who never served in the armed forces.

The fact that he’d never been in battle didn’t bother his fans — one of whom actually worked with Clancy on a book. In the late 1990s, retired four-star Gen. Chuck Horner co-authored “Every Man a Tiger” with Clancy. “Tom is first and foremost a historian,” Horner said of his writing pal. “He knows more about military history than I do.”

How did a writer of popular fiction gain such a following among warfighters ?

Part of it was luck. Just as President Kennedy’s praise of “From Russia With Love” gave spy novelist Ian Fleming a big boost in the early 1960s, President Reagan’s enthusiasm for “The Hunt for Red October” helped put Clancy on best-seller lists in the mid-1980s.

Another part of it was research. Clancy dug deep into obscure but non-classified journals, books and websites to gather information about military technology and intelligence operations. Novels such as “Red October” and “The Sum of All Fears” were packed with so much detail that some readers assumed he’d been privy to top-secret data.

In recent years, Clancy slowed down. New “Tom Clancy novels” were mostly collaborations with other writers. He died Oct. 1 at age 66.

It’s true that many of Clancy’s works showcased a Cold War, black-or-white view of the world. We live in a grayer place now, where Russia can defuse a U.S. war with Syria.

Clancy reminded readers of a time when the lines were more clearly drawn, West vs. East, good vs. evil, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

This editorial first appeared in the Northwest Florida Daily News, a Halifax Media Group newspaper in Florida.